Architecture Lecture Series: Germane Barnes
“Erase me”
This talk highlights the work of Studio Barnes in their desire to promote and celebrate ignored and forgotten authors. Working at multiple scales, Studio Barnes will present numerous projects that highlight the collisions of architecture and identity in the built environment. Collaboratively assisting marginalize communities, Studio Barnes aims to show what an experimental practice can achieve when people are prioritized before space.
Germane Barnes is the Principal of Studio Barnes and Associate Professor and the Director of the Community Housing & Identity Lab (CHIL) at the University of Miami School of Architecture. Barnes’s practice investigates the connection between architecture and identity, examining architecture’s social and political agency through historical research and design speculation. Believing strongly in design as a process, he approaches each condition imposed on a project as an opportunity for transformation.
Born in Chicago, Barnes received a bachelor’s of science in architecture from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a master’s of architecture from Woodbury University, where he was awarded the Thesis Prize for his project Symbiotic Territories: Architectural Investigations of Race, Identity, and Community.
His work has been exhibited recently in the Museum of Modern Art’s groundbreaking 2021 exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America and the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial. He was a winner of the 2021 Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Designers, and is a 2021–2022 Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. His work has also been featured and added to the permanent collections of international institutions, most notably MAS Context; Milan Design Week; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; LACMA; The Art Institute of Chicago; The New York Times; Architect Magazine; and The National Museum of African American History and Culture, where he was identified as one of the future designers on the rise.
Cosponsored by AIA East Bay
